In Oregon today, we participated in a press conference announcing our contribution of $350,000 to a joint open source technology initiative of Oregon State University and Portland State University. With the grant, the universities will collaborate to encourage open source software and hardware development, develop academic curricula and provide computing infrastructure to open source projects worldwide.

Scott Kveton and Bart Massey have both done terrific work to date and we're happy to be able to help them continue creating more open source developers, code, and infrastructure. I've asked them to provide us the odd post now and then to tell us how it is going.

The Google Blog has a link to the Governor's press release and some other details about the donation.

As the remaining awards are being distributed and the t-shirts are being prepped to ship out, we thought we'd give you an idea of the both the global scope and the hard work done by the students and mentors during the Summer of Code. We've put together a map and a list of projects for your examination. Please note that not all of the projects are listed quite yet, but we wanted to share some info with the people who follow this site.

Thanks to all the students and mentors who worked so hard on making this effort succeed!

Our very own Engineering VP Adam Bosworth will be giving a keynote address at the upcoming Zend / PHP Conference, taking place in San Francisco from October 18th to 21st. The conference theme is "Power Your Business with PHP". You can hear Adam's keynote along with addresses from Marc Andreessen, Zend co-founders Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, as well as executives from IBM, Oracle, Intel, and many more. In addition to keynotes and sessions, the conference will also feature tutorials, certification, and a party continuing the celebration of the 10th Anniversary of PHP.

XML.Com has a pretty great 3 page maps howto up on their site. Check it out if you are interested in maps related stuff. It gives some solid information on how to handle geocoding to latitude and longitude using the excellent (and free!) Geocoder.us database.